Paint Schoodic

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Tuesday, June 13, 2017

You call this working?

For me, serious illness was a corrective to the impulse to tiptoe around my calling. It reminded me that time is precious and fleeting.

As I tried to figure out how my carefully-planned day went
so haywire, a friend pointed out, “you hate packing and you love boats.” That
is the only explanation for giving up what I absolutely had to do in order to
join Howard Gallagher and Ken DeWaard on the Dirty Dory.

Camden is full of beautiful boats. It’s easy enough to find
opportunities to paint them at rest. It’s much more difficult to see them under
sail. I have a few photos from last year’s trip on American Eagle. Two years ago,
Howard took the late Lee Boynton and me
out to see the start of the Eggemoggin
Reach Regatta. We shot pictures of modern boats. But opportunities to shoot
the massive old schooners under way are limited, and I should grab them when I
can.

Mercantile raising her sails.

It takes a skilled navigator to get in position while not
annoying the schooner crew, and Howard is that. Here’s the video he shot while
we were out:

One of the boats we followed out was the ketch Angelique. She is distinctive for her
brown-rose tan-barked sails. In 2016, Poppy
Balser and I sketched her as she stood off Castine in a harbor that already hosted Bowdoin
and J&E Riggin. It was a
magical morning but eventually I finished and left. Poppy
stayed; Angelique docked; Poppy scored. Timing, as they say, is everything.

This three-day event is full of meet-and-greet events, more
than this old recluse is accustomed to. The culmination is a Collector’s Gala on
Saturday night. I'm a little anxious at its posh description. Oh, well. One bright side to owning only one dress is that one doesn’t
need to dither about what to wear. No, I'm not packed, but in the end, will anyone remember what I wore?

My husband says that after my first bout with cancer, I quit
doing things I didn’t want to do. That’s not entirely true; every life is full
of mundane and humdrum chores like packing. What has changed is that I try to not let
obligation stand in the way of opportunity. Serious illness is a great
corrective to the human impulse to tiptoe around our true calling. It reminds us
that time is precious and fleeting.

2 comments:

And that illness does not have to be your own. When a dear, dear friend develops lung cancer and you watch and help out as best you can while her world closes in around her, you learn very quickly that every moment is precious.